The head of the state agency overseeing the multi-billion-dollar Everglades restoration project said this week he will no longer let his employees cooperate with the top scientists who are supposed to be advising the project.

South Florida Water Management District executive director Pete Antonacci declared at a public meeting Thursday that his agency will no longer work with the National Academies of Science — one of the nation's premier scientific organizations — because science advisers there won't "tend to their knitting."

Antonacci told his agency's governing board that he's angry at scientists poking their noses into things that don't concern them and won't back off.

"I regard that as simply a line in the sand," Antonacci told the governing board at the end of its West Palm Beach meeting. "I have informed them we are not going to participate" in a scheduled meeting next month.